Why are all the box office mavens giving Angels & Demons a pass? The film opened two weekends ago and came in at No. 1, barely beating Star Trek’s second week. Last weekend, it slipped to four (now behind Star Trek) with more than a 60 a 54 percent drop.

Box Office Mojo says the budget was $150M, which, given some of the likely profit-participation deals of Tom Hanks and Imagine (the Ron Howard-Brian Grazer production shingle), could be low. Distribution and marketing costs worldwide could total $70M more.

If Sony takes 55 percent of the box office receipts, that would mean the film would have to make $400M worldwide to break even. Since it’s at $300M already, that seems likely, and with significant DVD sales to come, the movie is going to make some money.

All that said, Angels & Demons is the biggest under-performer of the year thus far. The model for sequels, remember, is to far outpace the original. (See The Matrix Reloaded, Shrek 2, Pirates 2, Bourne Supremacy, National Treasure 2, The Mummy Returns, etc. etc. etc.)

The fact is that Howard and Hanks damaged the brand. The Da Vinci Code was one of the worst-reviewed major movies of all time—a 46 percent positive score on Metacritic, an incredible 10 percent on Rotten Tomatoes’ “top critics” list. It was laughed off the screen at Cannes, and Variety called it “stodgy” and “grim.”

But no one asked Ron Howard or Tom Hanks about that on their chirpy PR campaigns last week. It was all ancient history.

Update: The film’s decline eased a little over the weekend, to 54 percent, still steep drop off. The weekend overviews, in the Times and in Variety, both noted the movie’s slip to fourth place without comment.

And in the end, what’s the highest it will gross domestically? $130M? Isn’t that a pathetic showing for an entry is one of the biggest franchises in the world? The new Night in the Museum will hit that sometime next week—and that film is yet another sequel that far outstripped its original at the box office.

I saw the thing yesterday and … it’s not bad, nowhere near as senselessly frenetic and ploddingly plotted. On the other hand, there remains evidence that no one involved was using their brains. One plot point, for example, is Hanks’ long-running desire to get into the Vatican archives. But it transpires in the film he’s able to read either Latin nor Italian.

And his character, of course, is a professor specializing in Vatican arcana. Harvard must have dropped its language requirements, another sign of the decline in American education. Little did the Vatican know that if it did let him in to the archives, he couldn’t have read anything anyway.

Pixar is one of those companies for whom even bad news gets spun a little nice.

Consider the NY Times’ look at the company today. The Times is, as always, a serious paper with serious reporters, and Brooks Barnes should be given credit for taking on the subject, which is that some higher-ups at Disney are finally beginning to take a look at Pixar’s ever-declining box office figures.

(See Hitsville’s earlier “Is the Pixar Brand failing?”)

And the story goes deeper than I had imagined, noting that, Cars excepted, the company has been really lagging on the toy merchandising front.

(Cars, incredibly, produced $3 billion in toy sales. Ratatouille and Wall-E? Not so much.)

But the cumulative effects are now showing themselves:

Some industry watchers, a few of them still griping about the hefty $7.4 billion that Disney paid for Pixar in 2006, are fretting about the [forthcoming Up’s] commercial potential, particularly when it comes to benefiting other Disney businesses.

Richard Greenfield of Pali Research downgraded Disney shares to sell last month, citing a poor outlook for “Up” as a reason.

That’s all fine, but check out how Pixar’s box office gets described:

Adjusted for inflation, Pixar’s films have generated a combined $2.65 billion at North American theaters, a spectacular showing. “Finding Nemo” in 2003 was the high point, selling $405.6 million in tickets.

Pixar’s last two films, “Wall-E” and “Ratatouille,” have been the studio’s two worst performers, delivering sales of $224 million and $216 million respectively, according to Box Office Mojo, a tracking service. Attendance for Pixar films has also dropped sharply over the years, suggesting that ticket price inflation helped prop up overall sales for “Wall-E” and “Ratatouille.”

Emphasis added. In the second paragraph, he’s talking about a single metric, the popularity of a Pixar film, as if it has two separate parts. The figures he’s citing are corrected for inflation, so they by definition contain the evidence of the falling attendance, right?

(Inside a studio, there are two metrics; how much money the film made, and how much profit the company made on it. But that’s not the distinction here.*)

I don’t understand why the NY Times and other papers don’t have a single consistent standard for talking about box office figures. There’s a simple one available: Attendance, which can be simply calculated from box office and average ticket prices, with a little tweaking for kids films, which of course average a little bit less.

Absent that, what gets made opaque is the real bad news for Pixar. Here’s how I calculated it a few months ago, emphasis added:

Maybe I’ve missed it, but I haven’t seen any discussion of how Pixar’s formidable box office muscles have been weakening. I’m not buying into the money-equals-quality equation, here; the excellence of the films is a different matter. While no one was looking Pixar became a massively successful company seemingly run entirely by artists. And the company’s probably never going to lose money on a movie.

Still: Wall-E is the fourth film in a row that has brought Pixar’s per-film average down.

For Finding Nemo, Toy Story 2 and Monsters Inc., Pixar averaged a $350 million North American gross, adjusted for inflation. The company’ last four films have averaged $250 million; its last three films $235 million, and last two films $217 million.

Pixar makes a lot of money overseas and from toys; and there hasn’t been a Shrek-sized animated hit in a while from any studio.

But Wall-E’s tepid box office ($223 million, just above Ratatouille’s $212 million) is pretty portentous as it moves forward under the Disney aegis.

The $3 billion in Cars toy sales answers the question of why there will be a Cars sequel, which nobody in the world is clamoring for. That and Toy Story 3, another concession to the bottom line, probably represent the company’s short-term battle plan.

If it doesn’t have a long-term one, sooner or later Disney is going to put the screws to Pixar. When that happens I predict we’ll see a recycling of the same stories we saw about the Weinstein and Disney, or New Line and Time Warner … heavy on sympathies to the victimized artistes, light on the reality that the artists gave up their autonomy when they sold themselves to the big bad wolf for $7.4 billion.

* In the story, Barnes writes:

The budget for “Up” is about $175 million excluding marketing, on par with other Pixar titles.

Box Office Mojo, however, says that Finding Nemo, by contrast, cost $94 million just six years ago. The disparity in budgets and appeal overseas means that, in strict dollar terms, Pixar made about one tenth as much profit on Wall-E as it did on Nemo.

 From a WSJ profile of the guy who produced Watchmen:

Last year’s “The Dark Knight” is the second-highest grossing film ever in the U.S., bringing in more than $500 million at the box office.

Inflated Hollywood Play Money™ is what studios, PR firms, and lazy journalists use when they are looking for some superlatives to throw around. Since the dollars they are talking about are not adjusted to take account of the ineluctable rise in movie-ticket prices, it gives films the opportunity to set a never ending string of records.

In reality, The Dark Knight is not the second-highest-grossing film ever. It’s not in the top five, nor the top ten. It’s not even in the top 25. But it’s much less fun to say, “The Dark Knight is about as big as The Jungle Book.”

Nikki Finke agreeably posts that The Dark Knight is hitting the $1 billion mark in worldwide receipts. This is an entirely meaningless benchmark in the world of Inflated Hollywood Play Money™.

On Box Office Mojo’s all-time corrected-for-inflation chart for domestic releases, the film—whose box office has been endlessly bloviated about this year—appears not in the top five, ten or even twenty, but rests at 27, below such forgotten blockbusters-of-their day as Grease and Thunderball.

The impact of rising ticket prices are harder to assess in worldwide charts, but they are skewed even more by the changing efficiencies of timed global releases. On that chart, Dark Knight currently resides at number three, but a cursory look finds at least ten more films whose worldwide box office probably surpasses it. But box office stories are a lot less interesting when the news comes down to, “Well, it’s about as big as The Sixth Sense.”

Nikki Finke goes on and on about The Dark Knight’s box office success:

So The Dark Knight posts still another best-ever. Media By Numbers is reporting that Warner Bros’ latest Batman installment crossing the $500 million domestic gross milestone today after only 45 days in release. It’s already the second-highest grossing pic of all time behind only the $600.8 million domestic haul of Titanic which took 91 days to pass $500M. The projected domestic cume for Dark Knight is $502,421,000 after this weekend. Interestingly, Wednesday, August 27th (its 41st day of release) was the first single day that the film earned below $1 million. In all, Dark Knight has set 14 major movie records since its release July 18th:

I won’t bore you with the actual records. Again, however, when you are talking about Inflated Hollywood Play Money™, box office records are everywhere.

When you talk about real money, and real box-office attendance figures, The Dark Knight’s achievments are less interesting. They run more like …

* The Dark Knight has now sold about as many tickets as Shrek 2!

* If it keeps going at this rate, why, it might be as popular as Thunderball!

* But probably not Grease!

Now, all that said, The Dark Knight does deserve credit for rolling up even those numbers at a time when movie attendance, as the last item noted, is declining. Part of its success has to do with Imax screenings, which have totaled $42M. (Take those away, and the film’s adjusted box office falls back to Independence Day territory.)

So Warner deserves credit for milking the film’s fanboy base with those large-format exhibitions and repeat viewings. It’s a marketing triumph, of which items like Finke’s play an important part.

———-

Previously in Hitsville:

Bogus box office and “The Dark Knight”
Box office records that aren’t
A record box office in 2007? Not so much
Crazy Nikki, PR person
The box office record that wasn’t, cont’d
A record summer that isn’t

Hedline in Variety:

Summer season a smash success

The actual story:

Through the Monday holiday, summer box office was estimated at roughly $4.12 billion vs. $4.16 billion for summer 2007. Year to date, the domestic box office is down about 1% vs. last year. Final tallies will be released today. Attendance is down by about 3%-4% for the summer and the year to date.

In other words, the summer box office was lower than last year’s*.

Overall domestic box office is lower than last year’s too.

And, leaving aside Inflated Hollywood Play Money™, attendance is down a significant chunk as well, both this summer and for the year to date.

Other than that, however, things are “smashing.”

* Last summer’s box office was called a record as well. In 2002, about 650 million movie tickets were sold; this summer that figure was about 580 million. That’s a decline of more than 10 percent in six years–in the face of a sizable population increase as well.

———-

Previously in Hitsville:

Bogus box office and “The Dark Knight”
Box office records that aren’t
A record box office in 2007? Not so much
Crazy Nikki, PR person
The box office record that wasn’t, cont’d
A record summer that isn’t

… anything can happen!

It’s as hallowed a statistic to Hollywood as Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak is to baseball: “Titanic’s” record box-office gross of $600.8 million. All of a sudden, that mark might be within “The Dark Knight’s” reach.

Distribution executives have started debating in earnest the potential total “Dark Knight” haul, which already has passed $300 million and is projected to eclipse the $400-million mark on Aug. 4 or 5. Although half a dozen industry insiders surveyed Monday said “Titanic’s” record appeared safe for now, the majority of distribution executives placed the film’s probable final gross just past $500 million, thanks in part to repeat business from across the audience spectrum.

That’s John Horn in the LAT, who goes on like that for another six grafs before getting around to mentioning that Titanic’s grosses were in 1998 dollars. But he’s not even sure of the implications of that:

Because “Titanic” came out when movie tickets were much cheaper (an average of $4.69 in 1998), it could still have sold more tickets than the “Dark Knight” will, even if the latter film somehow ends up grossing more. The average movie ticket will probably run about $7 this year.

What’s “could”? Ticket prices average $7.08 this year, according to Box Office Mojo. That’s 50 percent higher than 1998. (Titanic came out at the end of 1997.)

In other words, more than 125 million admissions were sold to Titanic.

The Dark Knight would need to make almost $900 million to equal that.

In other words, according to all the experts Horn spoke to, at best The Dark Knight might be slightly more than half as popular as Titanic. So, yeah, Titanic’s record does seem “safe for now.” And if Dark Knight does make $500 million, that will just put it in the company of the first Spider-man and Shrek 2, the two other recent mega-blockbusters.

But of course, a sentence like “The new Batman movie is doing pretty well at the box office. It might be about as big as Shrek 2” isn’t as much fun as playing with pretend money.
———-

Previously in Hitsville:

Bogus box office and “The Dark Knight”
Box office records that aren’t
A record box office in 2007? Not so much
Crazy Nikki, PR person
The box office record that wasn’t, cont’d
A record summer that isn’t

In the previous post, I noted that the Police’s current tour will end up grossing in the neighborhood of $350 million; according to Billboard, this is the third highest-grossing tour of all time*.

Those numbers and that all-time status mean something: The money from touring is growing at an amazing pace. The industry finds ever-more people to pay ever-higher prices, and it seems like every five or ten years the top-grossing bands are bringing in double what they made on their last record-breaking tour.

Movie tickets are a slightly different commodity. Movie tickets prices go up, but only by about twenty cents or so a year; only this year did the average ticket price break $7. And attendance is dropping. But box office grosses and all the attendant hyperbole, nurtured along by breathless industry watchers, creates an illusion of success and broken records that the facts don’t back up.

The main mover behind box office records is marketing changes that have affected the way people go to movies. (Or I suppose it could be said that changes in the way people go to movies has affected the marketing.)

The Dark Knight made $158 million its first three days, breaking by about five percent a “record” set by Spider-man 3 last year, which did $151 million.

Two things. Of the papers I read, only the Los Angeles Times answered the obvious question:

The average movie ticket in 2008 costs $7.08, compared with $6.88 last year, according to Media by Numbers. By simple arithmetic, that means “Dark Knight” sold about 21.94 million tickets, compared with 21.96 million for the web slinger.

In other words, The Dark Knight’s record isn’t a record at all.

Second, let’s talk total grosses. Spider-man 3 set off the last bit of broken-record frenzy, but when the dust cleared the movie ended up grossing $336 million. According to Box Office Mojo, the invaluable box-office data web site, the film’s opening brought in some 44 percent of its eventual total earnings in the U.S.

$336 million is a lot of money, and puts the film just inside the top 15 highest-grossing movies in Hollywood history.

But that’s if you are using Inflated Hollywood Play Money. Adults use real money, which is subject to inflation.

Take that into account, and Spider-man 3 is number 92. The second Pirates movie, number 3 on the opening weekend list, is number 46 on the all time inflation-corrected list, and Shrek the Third, fourth on the opening weekend list, is 99 on the real money list.

Spider-man 3 is far behind not just true blockbusters like Jaws and The Sound of Music and Titanic—it’s far behind all sort of eh cinematic tripe like Twister and Smokey and the Bandit and Mrs. Doubtfire

In other words, Spider-man 3 held the last opening record, but it wasn’t all that big of an actual smash movie. It was a successful movie of which it could be said this: That a larger percentage than normal of its eventual audience went to see it on its opening weekend.

But that makes for a boring movie hedline, and wouldn’t really work in the bold-faced caps favored by Nikki Finke when she breathlessly reports on the film’s “box-office records.”

While The Dark Knight could break this pattern, the real record that it has broken is the one about which marketing campaign can get the most people who were going to see the thing anyway into the theater the first few days the movie is out.

You have to read far down in the coverage of The Dark Knight’s opening weekend in papers other than the LAT to get a hint of this. In the NY Times, the lede says the movie is “shoring up what so far had been a wobbly year at the movie box office.”

In the Wall Street Journal, the hedline reads, “Batman snaps Hollywood slump.”

Actually, attendance is down this year from last almost four percent, and last year itself was down almost ten percent from 2002, the industry’s last banner year. And when you take population growth into account the situation is even worse.

Both stories get around to mentioning that admissions are down, but almost apologetically. The writers’ hearts are really rooting for that wobbly, slump of a year to be shored up, or snapped, or something.

It’s part of a pattern in such stories, where some goofy claim is made and then, a graf or two later, contradicted by actual facts.

For example, in the Journal story, Lauren Schuker writes:

The big overall performance—coming in the midst of a tumbling housing market, high gas prices and other economic maladies—will add another example in support of one of Hollywood’s favorite claims: that the industry is resistant to financial downturns. Indeed, both ticket sales and box-office revenue in the U.S. have often held up during bad times, as they did in the wake of the dot-com bust earlier this decade. The argument is that movies remain less expensive than other recreational activities such as travel or professional sporting events.

An inch or two farther down the story, however, she tells us this:

But that doesn’t mean the theatrical film business is growing. In recent years, any increases in box-office revenue have generally been the result of higher ticket prices, not increased attendance.

But … that’s what you just said! That is what that means. You said the business was resistant to financial downturns, that sales were holding up during bad times.

Why not just say: “Hollywood may claim the business is resistant to financial downturns, but while Warner Brothers did indeed get a lot of the people who were going to see The Dark Knight anyway out to see it on its opening weekend, that doesn’t really mean anything. Movie attendance just keeps dropping.”

* After the Stones’ Bigger Bang tour and U2 Vertigo tour.

Speed Racer flops on its opening weekend, ekeing out barely $20 million on more than 3500 screens. Nikki Finke gleefully jumps on the corpse here. A more sober AP story is here; Box Office Mojo’s weekend list is here.

The world Finke lives in can be slightly unhinged; but it must be noted her Sunday box office analyses are earlier and more comprehensive than anything else I’m aware of. It’s 2 p.m. PDT right now, and even Box Office Mojo doesn’t have a full analysis up. (Finke’s is time-stamped at 2 a.m.)

Isn’t this the purview of the LAT? The AP wire on latimes.com I link to above is warm beer; Finke’s piece is smarter, based on better knowledge, and brings up a number of important tangential issues. (The paper will be particularly embarrassed if Finke is right [see below] and What Happens in Vegas ends up passing Speed Racer for second place once the final figures for the weekend are released Monday.) In what new-media universe does the LAT get outclassed on a basic housekeeping coverage of a hometown industry like this?

As for the Speed Racer debacle, it seems as if the Wachowskis hung themselves with a too-long movie based on a too-little-beloved bit of kitsch. The wonderment I found in the animation wasn’t shared by other critics made restless by the two-hour-plus running time, not to mention the families at whom the thing was directed. I’ve seen figures from $120 million to $160 million listed as the film’s production budget; throw in marketing costs and Warners is dependent on the kindness of a whole lot of overseas strangers to get out of the way of a potential category 5 flop.

Update: The actuals for the weekend are in and Finke was right; Speed Racer is third with only $18.5 million. International receipts are in as well and are even worse, totaling $12.6 million. This is embarrassing for the papers that ran superficial wire copy rather than canny expert analysis.

Iron Man’s big opening is getting the usual treatment from the press, which largely accepts the studio PR line to give the film two hyperbolic “records”: Take a deep breath and pick either “the second highest non-sequel opening of all time” or “tenth highest opening weekend of all time.”

As I have written in the past, this is true only if you are doing your calculations in the “Inflated Play Money™” beloved by studio publicists, those who have a need to suck up to them, and the dumb. Here’s the AP version, as posted on the NYT web site:

”Iron Man” was the 10th biggest opening of all time and the fourth biggest for a superhero movie. Among nonsequels, it came in behind only the first ”Spider-Man,” which premiered with $114.8 million.

If you take the rise of ticket prices into account, Iron Man probably comes in 15th overall, not tenth. And Spider-Man earned the equivalent of about $135M today. In both cases the distinction is slightly less than billed.

The sobering details later in the story, in between the talk about the movie biz getting the “shot in the arm” it needs, is that ticket sales are still off six percent from last year; indeed, Spidey 3 opened a year ago (with $150M), so even the biggest opening of 2008 thus far represents a thirteen percent drop from the same weekend in 2007.

Even Variety’s version of events was slightly off:

Paramount and Marvel Studios’ summer tentpole “Iron Man” mined enough in its box office debut to join the pantheon of all-time highest openers, grossing an estimated $104.2 million domestically and $96.8 million internationally for a worldwide cume of $201 million in its first five days.

Hollywood couldn’t wish for a better way to start summer 2008 than with the launch of a new film franchise, considering the lack of titan sequels that gave the film biz its best summer on record last year at the domestic B.O. –a blessing and a curse, since comparisons will be tough.

Emphases added. In the first graf, I don’t know if there’s an official pantheonic cutoff number, but if there is I bet it’s smaller than 15. In the second, you have to read carefully first to figure out that the writer is trying to say that there won’t be as many sequels to drum up box office this year as last. (This is true, technically, since virtually every movie released last summer was a sequel of some sort, where this summer only about every other week will see a big-budget film based either on a previous movie or TV show.)

But the stark truth is that the “record” everyone was talking about last summer, was, in non-“Inflated Play Money™” terms, not a record at all. With the rise in ticket prices taken into account, the box office was a wash from the year before, and overall attendance was down nearly 10 percent from 2002.

I hate it when Nikke Finke is right about something. On Sunday, she wrote that the new George Clooney movie, Leatherheads, had come in third in the week’s box-office rankings. She wrote:

Leatherheads […] stumbled badly at the box office this weekend, making only $12.5 million from 1,769 theaters and finishing only No. 3. (Interestingly, the pic’s studio, Universal, claimed it was No. 2, but every other Hollywood major had it as No. 3 behind Sony’s 21 and Fox/Walden’s Nim’s Island.)

The inimitable bold-italic emphasis is Finke’s. The box-office figures reported yesterday, however, had Leatherheads at number two. But now Variety writes:

Final figures released Monday showed “Island” nearly matching its Sunday estimate with $13.2 million while the Universal pic’s number slid 6% to $12.7 million. And U’s estimate for Sunday’s total missed by about 28%.

Rival studios had indicated on Sunday that they believed Universal’s estimate for its period comedy was overly optimistic. But a U rep said the Sunday estimate was based on comparisons of performances by similar pics.

The “Leatherheads” performance came in well under pre-weekend forecasts, which had it coming in first.

Revisions like that aren’t entirely rare; less uncommon, however, is a little studio numbers manipulation when a big star’s personal project is on the line.

The official box office figures from 2007 are out, Reuters reports:

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) on Wednesday released its yearly film industry statistics, reflecting a 5.4 percent increase in U.S. box office receipts in 2007 to an all-time high.

Continuing a recovery that began in 2006 after an industry-wide slump in 2005, domestic box office ticket sales climbed to a record $9.63 billion over the previous year’s level of $9.14 billion.

The news prompts Nate Anderson, over at Ars Technica, to ridicule the movie industry’s concerns about piracy. He is careful to mention the ever growing bandwidth and ease of use of torrents and the like, but still maintains the industry’s concerns are overstated:

Swapping movies over the Internet was more of a niche practice back in 2001 as bandwidth constraints made it impractical for many. Certainly it’s much simpler now, and advanced P2P protocols like BitTorrent (combined with free trackers like The Pirate Bay) make it relatively simple. But the movie business did $9.63 billion at theaters alone in 2007, a substantial increase over 2001’s $8.13 billion. US box office has also risen for the last two years, and international growth rates have been much higher and more constant.

[…]

So break out the champagne (for the MPAA execs) and the dog biscuits (for Lucky & Flo); home taping didn’t kill the music business, and file-swapping isn’t destroying theatrical revenue.

Ars is one of the sharpest and most valuable news sites on the web, for my money, but this article seems way off. Home taping? That’s the point of comparison?

Seven or eight years on, it’s hard to see how the digital distribution of music will not, in the end, vaporize the traditional music industry. Making the argument that it will not happen in the TV and movie fields is difficult at this point. The MPAA, quite reasonably, from its perspective, is softening up the populace for the all-out war it expects to wage as computers evolve to handle the increased size of video (and, soon, HD) files.

Beyond that, the real story is that movie admissions have remained flat; virtually all the studio’s increased revenues came from higher ticket prices. Given population increases, it’s hard not to argue that movie viewing actually declined last year; indeed, by Ars’ own figures (there’s a handy chart accompanying the story), revenues have gone up less than 4 percent since 2002, a growth more than explained by ticket prices, and again it’s a net decline in sales when population growth is taken into account. From the industry’s perspective, that’s something to worry about.

The real issue is this: The companies need to get ahead of the game because it’s going to happen no matter how much propagandizing they do or how many lawsuits they file. That’s why NBC’s petulant battles with Apple are so frustrating to watch.

The other angle, which isn’t talked about enough, should be making legitimate product easier to use than illegal product, not vice versa. I can’t be the only person who’s tired of vainly trying to skip or fast-forward through a half dozen FBI warnings, and various chunks of corporatespeak text (sometimes duplicated in French!) in front of every darn DVD I have dutifully gone out and bought.

Just the other day I torrented … ah, I mean, I spoke to a friend, a friend, who in a couple of hours torrented the entire first season of a certain famous American television series, never generally released on DVD, whose movie version is scheduled for release soon.

This … friend marveled at how easy it was to watch the thing on his computer; you click a file once and the show starts. Net time elapsed: less than three seconds. There are no special features, but there are no corporate logos, French copyright warnings, or charming little discussions of how the opinions in the commentary are not the opinions of Big Content Inc.™, which are then repeated in French as well, either.

Why should I—er, why should this friend sit through minutes of corporate crap when he buys a DVD, when the illegal version is so much more convenient to use?

The NY Post says the only thing the Oscars have going for it this year is the fact that there hasn’t been much glitz around, what with the writers strike. Advertisers are telling themselves that that might bring in some more viewers, despite the fact that relatively few people have seen the most-nominated films:

Advertisers are counting on TV-starved viewers to make this year’s Oscars show a ratings winner despite a lineup of obscure and bleak films.

With much of the TV landscape in ruins after the writers’ strike, marketers believe the star-studded telecast will attract a relatively large audience desperate for something - anything - beyond reruns and reality shows.

An accompanying graphic detailing the falling ratings for the annual event, however, shows the paper’s true feelings. Oscar has a bag over its head in shame—and we’re told “ho-hum host” Jon Stewart may keep viewers away. It’s unfortunately true that the box office of the best picture nominees seems to have the most effect on viewership. If the ratings (after a slight bump up last year) continue to decline it seems inevitable that the Academy will have to figure out something to rekindle the show’s appeal, despite the fact that the group can always hike ad rates in the interim. While ostensible competition like the Globes come nowhere near the Oscar telecast’s ratings, the group can’t be unaware that that might not always be the case.

As summer began last year, the movie-release schedule was a parody of itself: What on first glance seemed the usual raft of sequels became, on further examination, a less-usual raft of threequels, beginning with the latest iterations of “Pirates of the Caribbean,” “Shrek” and “Spiderman” (all released in May), but also including “The Bourne Ultimatum,” “Ocean’s 13” and “Rush Hour 3”; the fourth or fifth “Harry Potter”; and the fourth “Die Hard.”

It’s easy to make fun of the movie industry for such pathetic, “The Player”-like lack of ideas. But of course it’s the audience that dictates what gets released and, as can be seen from the annual box office returns, the top seven slots include no less than five threequels.

There are a lot of great movies that get released, so this isn’t an aesthetic issue. But at a certain point someone is going to notice that the industry is in effect cannibalizing itself. This point doesn’t get noted enough in analyses of the film industry. The Times’ year-end wrap up goes out of its way to note that the three top grossing threequels didn’t do as well as their respective predecessors, if you take inflation into account. This is good in the sense that too many box-office stories don’t mention the effects of inflation, which obviates most of the silly records bruited about by the industry. That said, the idea that the $300M-plus grosses of the last “Shrek,” “Spidey” and “Pirates” is anything but great news for the studios is silly. (Disney has now grossed more than $2.5 billion from box offices alone from a franchise—based on a Disneyland ride, remember—that was considered a joke before the first film was released.)

But of course, while box office was up four percent this year, attendance was about the same as last year’s. Which means that the many threequels had to find their audience from people who were giving up seeing other movies.

Again, I don’t think this hurts smaller, presumably better, films; no one went to see “Pirates” instead of “No Country for Old Men.” And the trend does have to end at some point, or the movie industry will devolve, in about the year 2019, into a slate of six or seven films, total, annually, ranging from “Mission: Impossible: 9” to “When Wolverine met the Invisible Woman,” the long awaited X-Men-meet-the-Fantastic-4 epic. But it does take the movie industry a step or two further down a dead-end street.

Nikki Finke trumpets that the Harry Potter films are the biggest box-office franchise of all time—or, as she breathlessly hedlines it, “Harry Potter Biggest Film Franchise Ever!”:

With the success of this summer’s Harry Potter And The Order of the Phoenix, Warner Bros announced today that its five Harry Potter films have combined to become the top-grossing film franchise worldwide in history. It surpasses even the box office total of all 22 James Bond and 6 Star Wars franchises, with two films yet to come — Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The combined worldwide box office gross for the five Harry Potter films to date is in excess of $4.47 billion even as The Order Of The Phoenix is still going strong in theaters around the globe. In addition to holding the franchise box office record, all five of the Harry Potter films are among the 20 top-grossing box office hits of all time.

This is, of course, the “Inflated Play Money™” box-office record beloved by studio publicists, those who have a need to suck up to them, and the dumb. Finke is talking about worldwide grosses, at which the Harry Potter films excel in particular and in any case benefit from more efficient modern studio global-marketing campaigns. Still, as can be seen in Box Office Mojo’s inflation-corrected list of domestic earnings, all but one of the Star Wars films made more money than the highest-grossing of the Potters, “Sorcerer’s Stone.” (The original “Star Wars” made three times what “Sorcerer’s Stone” did, in fact.) And George Lucas isn’t too bad at worldwide marketing himself. I don’t feel like doing the math, but since two of the 22 James Bond films (”Thunderball” and “Goldfinger”) heavily outgrossed “Sorcerer’s Stone” domestically, I don’t think it’s likely Potter surpasses Bond, either, in real dollars.

A puzzling story in the NYT on Hollywood’s record summer. If I understand the premise of the story aright, the movie industry just had a record, $4 billion box office for the summer season, which concluded Labor Day weekend. “But the movie studios are not quite popping the Champagne — at least publicly,” writes Brooks Barnes:

Studio executives were quick to point out that the blockbuster hit “Spider-Man 3” was among the most expensive films ever made.

Indeed, to hear many studio executives talk, the movie business is closer to the edge of a cliff than ever. The 18-week summer season ending today looks great on paper, with 16 movies selling at least $100 million in tickets. But executives quickly point out that $4 billion is not a record when ticket sales are adjusted for inflation. Attendance was also lighter than in years past.

In other words: A fake record was set. Why aren’t the studios celebrating the fake record? Paging Nikki Finke.

Crazy Nikki Finke has caught box-office fever. Her latest post is titled:

OFFICIAL! Summer 2007 Smashes Record

Gotta love the opening clause of her breathless report:

Because of (or in spite of) all those blockbusters and threequels, Summer 2007 today crossed the $4 billion mark, setting a new record for total domestic gross receipts.

Because of (or in spite of) the fact that movie ticket prices are always going up, this really isn’t a record summer. As I wrote below, 2007 is running a hefty percentage below audience tallies earlier this decade. Since there is a constant that can be looked at—in this case, actual attendance figures—this focus on dollar amounts isn’t a harmless fetish. It’s a smokescreen for the industry (”Hollywood setting a record!”) to obscure the truth (”Hollywood not setting a record!”).

Reading Finke is always a pleasure. Lower in the item, she gets around to mentioning the fact that actual ticket sales are below record highs. Here’s how she puts it; I leave her uneasy grammar and colorful punctuation intact:

[A]verage ticket prices in 2004 was $6.21 versus $6.85 in 2007. (Which is why Hollywood box office figures are starting to resemble baseball statistics with lots of asterisks after every record set…)

Why is this “starting” to happen? Hasn’t it always been that way? Why do we need asterisks? Wouldn’t we be able to eschew the asterisks just by focusing on the information that means something and ignoring the information that doesn’t? ? And I’m not a sports person, but aren’t the (very few) asterisks in sports based on extraordinary circumstances? Isn’t this movie issue the opposite, just the banal reality that prices always go up?

The LAT story on the weekend’s box office goes on and on about how Hollywood is on track to break a record.

The geek comedy “Superbad” was surprisingly popular in its opening weekend, racking up $31.2 million in the U.S. and Canada and putting Hollywood squarely on pace for a record summer at the box office.

[…]

Industrywide box-office totals were up from the same weekend in 2006 for the sixth straight time, according to Sunday’s studio estimates.

At $3.83 billion in ticket sales, this summer is running 10% ahead of last year—and with two weeks to go it looks certain to break the record of $3.95 billion from summer 2004.

It’s all very interesting, until you get to the last three grafs:

Even so, ticket price inflation is one of the big reasons the summer box office will exceed $4 billion for the first time.

Attendance is the strongest in three years but running behind the 2002-2004 period.

This summer will end up with about 600 million tickets sold, Media by Numbers projects, well shy of the record 650 million from summer 2002. That year the original “Spider-Man” and “Star Wars: Episode II” led the way.

In other words, it’s not a record, just … hype. But this would be a much less interesting lede:

“It’s been a decent summer for Hollywood, but attendance is still down a hefty 7 or 8 percent from the highs earlier this decade.”

p.s. There’s no “record 650 million from summer 2002,” by the way. Movie admissions today are a third or a fourth what they were in the 1940s, when the population was half what it is today. The 650M figure may be the highest since the late 1960s and early 1970s, when movie-going in America reached its nadir.